Oh, Will Graham. I love you and your pack of dogs.
And so does Alana.
Or maybe she would. I feel like half the time she looks at Will she looks at him as a child that needs to be protected from the evil in the world. And I suspect that doesn’t really lead to much of a relationship. Alana comes to Will’s house and tells him Abigail Hobbs woke up and the two of them go sit in the kitchen for a bit as she explains to him that he can’t go talk to her. Jack still thinks she was an accomplice.
Which, you know, considering what we saw in the trailer that seems pretty obvious. Also, when she wakes up in the hospital she does so having a nightmare of shooting a deer, gutting it, and then the deer turning into a girl. Plus there is the whole fact that she’s creepy as all get out. Abigail is talking to her about her parents being dead and after asking why her father wasn’t buried and admitting that she does remember what happened (even though she told the doctors and nurses that she didn’t remember) she just starts talking about selling the house and using the money for college. Cold, calculating. Other than that initial concern about her parents being buried there is nothing there to make you think she’s a functional, normal kid.
Alana hasn’t decided yet if that’s trauma, sociopathy, or something else. She thinks Abigail is hiding something. Jack wants Will to talk to her and find out where the bodies of the girls are. But considering in the memory where her father talked about using every part of the deer – as food and tools – to honor it… yeah. There is nothing left of those girls. Maybe some bones filed into knives or spikes or something. Who know. Nothing substantial remains at least.
Jack is pushing that Will see Abigail, though, and Hannibal seems to be on board. Probably because he’s super interested in seeing how far Will can be pushed towards the edge before he cracks or falls over it. They go to see Will but he’s giving a lecture – not really on Hobbs but the copycat. (Who we all know is Hannibal.) Will tells his students that whoever staged the girl in the field with the stags head was clearly not Hobbs and that whoever it was had to have known his methodology very well to have elevated it to this sort of sociopath artwork. The question is whether or not the copycat knew Hobbs. And they also talk about the phone call who warned Hobbs and how Will thinks that was the copycat. Which, you know, it was. We know that. I just want to know why it was untraceable? It came from the phone at the construction site. Couldn’t be hard to trace that. So… I don’t know.
Back in the hospital Freddie some how got in to talk to Abigail. Freddie talks to Abigail and gives her all the information the cops know. Including information about Will and she tries to demonize him bu telling Abigail that he is crazy himself – at the very least unstable – and that’s how he catches people like her father. Of course, she says this right as Will and Hannibal walk in. I will honestly be very surprised if she lives to see Red Dragon at the rate she’s pissing off Hannibal.
Poor Will, tough. The first thing she says to Will is that she remembers him as the man who killed her father. But then they go on a nice little walk out into a garden. I don’t really understand why she’s in this tiny ass psychiatric hospital. Will tries to reassure her and it’s pretty clear she’s not culpable for anything in his mind. Hannibal, though, is obviously picking up on something else and he changes his attention from Will to Abigail and back and forth. Meanwhile the two of them sort of bond over nightmares and he tells her how killing is terrible.
It makes no sense as to why they would have moved her from a real hospital and into this specialized one with psychiatrists and stuff without any reason. I mean, maybe it’s to protect her from the media or something but clearly that didn’t work if Freddie found her. And while Jack thinks she’s a sociopath I don’t think that’s enough. Freddie confronts Will and Hannibal outside and fake apologizes to Will. She claims to care about Abigail but, you know, it’s Freddie. She threatens to make things worse for him and to continue smearing his name in front of Abigail and the general public. To which Will responds, “It’s not very smart to piss off a guy who thinks about killing people for a living.”
Which, of course, she puts on her blog.
Jack is pissed. Not so much at Will but at the publicity and Hannibal for letting Will say that. The four of them get together and start talking about what to do with Abigail now. Send her home, keep her at the hospital. Jack decides to send her home because he really doesn’t care what happens to her emotionally and he still thinks she’s crazy. So. He’s all for that. Plus for whatever reason he thinks that by either confirming that she is or is not a killer like her father will prove that Will is right about the copycat being someone else.
Freddie, now unable to get to Abigail, goes to the family of the girl found on the stag head. She talks to her brother who is understandably upset and angry. After which Abigail goes home and finds ‘CANNIBALS’ written on the front door. Probably by the angry brother. Will, Alana, and Hannibal go with her and they walk through the house. They walk past where her mother died on the front porch and then go into the kitchen. She asks some pretty awkward questions and then sort of appeals to Will about how he pretends to be killers and think like them. She asks what it felt like to try and be Hobbs. Which he describes as talking to the man’s shadow.
Will and Alana tell her that the reason he snapped was that someone warned her father that someone was coming. They ask if she recognized the voice and she says no. But as she does it she very quickly and subtly looks to Hannibal. Who also notes the reaction. Oh, snap.
The group start going through things in the living room. They talk about whether or not someone can catch someone else’s psychiatric illness and Hannibal says that it’s possible – after all, what seems normal in one family can become normal to them. Will, frustrated by all that talk and remembering Hobbs’s last word (“See?”), is upset that there isn’t any evidence really left around. Which or whatever reason gets Abigail excited about reenacting the events. She tells Will to be her dad, Alana to be her mom, and Hannibal to be the man on the phone. There’s like a little stare down and it’s like, “Giiiiiiiiirl. You don’t know who you’re messing with right now.” Then Abigail tells them that there are no remains – her father probably ground them down and used them in his plumbing putty like he did with elk bones. Yechk.
One of Abigail’s best friends comes over and sort of awkwardly talks to her. They go into the backyard to be alone and she tells Abigail that her mom doesn’t want her talking to Abigail at all either. Also that everyone in the neighborhood thinks that she did it and hat she helped her dad. That the hunting was a clue. Not that the friend thinks Abigail did it. But then the brother Freddie talked to comes out of the woods and says that he thinks she did. He starts taunting her until her friend throws rocks at him and Will, Hannibal, and the friend’s mom come around the side of the house. For whatever reason, Hannibal covers up the rock with the blood on it. I guess so he can type the blood and track him down? I’m not sure.
Will goes home, goes to sleep, and starts having nightmares again. He sees the feathery elk and then himself as Hobbs cutting Abigail’s throat. Oh, Will.
The next day they go to Hobbs’s cabin with Abigail. She explains what they did there and how he was always so damn clean. Probably – in hindsight – to hide the evidence. She tells them that he did everything he could to use the deer. He made putty, butter, and sold the pelts for bags, rugs, etc. He told Abigail he had to use everything – otherwise it was murder. Then she asks if he was feeding the girls to them. Which, you know, obviously he was. That wasn’t deer meet he brought home or deer butter. It was people meet. And people butter. Abigail seems to get upset about it all and particularly upset about how her father killed those girls in place of her. Which Hannibal doesn’t seem to believe or something because he keeps giving her this really look.
Then blood starts dripping from the ceiling. There is a dead body on the second floor and it’s Abigail’s friend Melissa from earlier in the episode. Will and Hannibal talk about the other person in the woods – the stag head victim’s brother. When Will looks at the girl’s mouth she finds traces of skin and blood. The skin and blood from the rock! Whaaaaat. Hannibal. You douche. He’s framed the brother. Jack is upset with Will because he doesn’t like that Will was wrong about the copycat not killing that way again. He sends Will away and has Hannibal take Abigail home to get her things where Melissa’s mother starts shouting at her for killing her daughter. Not that she did. But still. And then Freddie shows up again claiming that she wants to talk Abigail still.
While Hannibal and Alana talk to the police about stepping up security, inside Abigail is alone. She gets really worked up and cuts open one of the pillows in the house and realizes it is stuffed with human hair. After which the brother shows up out of the shadows. Seriously, though. The cops? Kinda suck at their jobs. The brother tries to tell Abigail that he didn’t kill her friend and he grabs her. So she stabs him. And seems genuinely concerned about that. When Hannibal gets a peak of Abigail covered in blood, he knocks Alana out before she can see it, and then goes with Abigail to the body. We figure out that apparently she wasn’t an accessory to her father’s murders. But he becomes an accessory to this one. He tells Abigail that they can either try to claim self defense – because she straight up guttered this guy – or they can hid the body.
They go with the ‘hide the body’ option. Hannibal claims that it was the brother who knocked Alana out and that he hit Hannibal in the back of the head, too. Then Abigail managed to cut him or something as he ran away. Alana I’m not sure entirely understands that story. And Will – who should probably be picking up on this stuff but won’t because in his mind neither Hannibal nor Abigail can do any wrong – just wants to go home.
Abigail breaks out of the hospital and goes to find Hannibal. She’s afraid of sleeping because she’s afraid of nightmares. She’s also apparently afraid that what she did really was murder. Because she didn’t honor any part of the brother when she killed him. Abigail doesn’t entirely understand why Hannibal did what he did or why they didn’t go with the whole self defense thing. Hannibal tries to claim that it’s because there were people who would see even a self defense killing as proof she was just like her father. But then Abigail realizes that he’s glad she killed the man. It gives him something to hold over her so she can never tell anyone that it was his voice on the phone.
I see what you did there NBC. This whole time you had me going thinking that Abigail was a serial killer.
In truth, she was just a messed up kid that could possibly have gone that direction if pushed that way but she never was. Not until you set up this whole thing. Well, I guess he didn’t set up the whole thing. The brother would have been fine if not for Freddie. Goddamn it, Freddie. Ruining everyone’s lives.
Well, I think we’ve learned our lesson.
Don’t go by what the trailers show because they have some clever advertising people out there and they will try to lead you down the wrong paths. Touche, NBC. Touche.
I don’t think there is a whole lot of misinterpreting next week’s episode, though. Will’s sleeplessness and nightmares really are driving him to the edge. He winds up sleep walking in the middle of the street. He winds up on his roof. My question: where are his dogs in all of this?
Also, can I just say, I worry about those dogs. So much. Some serial killer is going to track Will down and kill the dogs. You don’t have animals in shows like this and expect them to survive. That’s all I’m saying.
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